Cnet: How the coronavirus origin story is being rewritten by a guerrilla Twitter group

[intrepidity]

This isn't going away. Please read the full article.

https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/how-the-coronavirus-origin-story-is-being-rewritten-by-a-guerrilla-twitter-group/

After a lot of trial and error, the Seeker stumbled upon exactly what he was looking for: a master's thesis written by a Chinese doctor. The document contained an account of six cases of "severe pneumonia caused by unknown viruses" in workers who had been cleaning an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan, China, in 2012. The patients' symptoms seemed eerily similar to those of COVID-19. Three of the patients, it said, died from the mystery illness.

The Yunnan mine and its resident bats, the Seeker knew, had been sampled by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He'd uncovered a missing puzzle piece: an association between the closest known relative of the coronavirus and research conducted at the institute in Wuhan, China.

(snip)

Part of the problem is that the origins story has become entangled in geopolitics and conspiracy. Bad actors have seized upon the lab leak theory for political gain, sometimes attempting to shift the blame for catastrophic failures in managing the pandemic. Instead of remaining a scientific debate, the origin story morphed into a political one. For instance, in March 2020, US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began propagating the idea that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from a Wuhan lab. The lab leak became intertwined with Trump, foreign policy and the right. Deigin says Trump weighing in "poisoned" the discussion.

[Phoenix61]

1. I'm curious why you are so motivated to push the theory that covid escaped from a lab?

I admire your persistence but really?

[live love laugh]

3. +1

[intrepidity]

4. I'm intrigued by the issue, and that folks here are afraid to discuss it

There is something to this story.

For me, I became convinced something was really, really wrong after I read Shi's Nature paper wherein she described SARS-Cov-2 as a bat coronavirus (Feb 2020) based on 96+% homology to a sequence that she didn't bother to properly reference until Nature posted an Addendum 9 months later.

I know something about writing a scientific paper, and that is something that just.doesn't.happen. Ever.

So, I started investigating further.

I still do not know the answer, but what I do know for certain, is that the CCP has engaged in a serious cover-up, for whatever reason.

[Phoenix61]

6. I don't think anyone is afraid to discuss anything.

You’re basing your belief on one article that didn’t cite information the way you think it should have been cited? Really? That’s the whole basis for this? Unbelievable!

[intrepidity]

7. Yeah, no, it's more complex

Anyone who has looked into this, or has read the linked articles, would understand.

ETA: if I thought you were genuinely interested, I'd take the time to elaborate.

[Phoenix61]

8. Oh... it's one of those things only people

in the know would understand. Why don’t you just come out and say what you believe instead of beating around the bush?

[intrepidity]

9. I did

I said that the one thing I am certain of, is that the Chinese government is/has engaged in a massive cover-up. And that alone makes this worth investigating.

The Nature paper issue is simply not as trivial a matter as you seem to dismiss. It just doesn't happen that you say "this sequence is similar to ____" and then neglect to cite the source of the reference sequence. That Nature published it as is, is just astounding.

[Phoenix61]

10. Oh, I think you are quite certain that the virus

was released from the Wuhan lab. What else would the Chinese government be covering up? And yes, I do think the article citation is trivial. They did publish the information although not in as timely a manner as they should have.

[womanofthehills]

15. The US would want to cover it up too if it came from the Wujan lab

because our Galveston Lab and the Wujan lab were like sister labs. Galveston trained many of Wujan's scientists to run a coronavirus lab. Also, lab leak info might bring attention to our many bio 3 and bio 4 labs and their anthrax leaks and safety violations. Obama stopped our gain-of-function Sars and bird flu lab work in 2014 because he was fearful that a leak could cause a pandemic. But.... our government still gave funding to Eco Health at this time. Trump came in office and reversed Obama's decision and again we were doing gain-of-function coronavirus research in our labs. Actually, our Fort Detrick lab was closed for a few months in early 2019 for safety violations and they were doing gain-of-function coronavirus research too. Remember when China was saying that if the virus escaped from a lab, it was our soldiers from Fort Detrick who brought it to Wujan. And the world turns.

CDC Inspection Findings Reveal More about Fort Detrick Research Suspension

24 Nov 2019
The Frederick News-Post, Md. | By Heather Mongilio

The Army's premier biological laboratory on Fort Detrick reported two breaches of containment earlier this year, leading to the Centers for Disease and Control halting its high-level research.

The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases announced Friday that it would restart its operations on a limited scale.

The two breaches reported by USAMRIID to the CDC demonstrated a failure of the Army laboratory to "implement and maintain containment procedures sufficient to contain select agents or toxins" that were made by operations in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories, according to the report. Biosafety level 3 and 4 are the highest levels of containment, requiring special protective equipment, air flow and standard operating procedures. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/11/24/cdc-inspection-findings-reveal-more-about-fort-detrick-research-suspension.html

[Phoenix61]

17. Your initial assumption is dubious at best and

goes downhill from there.
National Galveston Lab:
“Through our Biosafety Training Center, UTMB has provided laboratory safety and security training for scientists and operations personnel in more than 45 countries, including China. The relationship with Wuhan Institute of Virology and the GNL dates back to 2013 and has been facilitated through an ongoing dialogue co-sponsored by the Chinese Academies of Science and U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, with cooperation from the Chinese CDC and others.”
Exactly how does that make them “sister labs”? Are they “sister labs” with all the labs where people they have trained work?

You really believe the Trump administration would want to cover for China? It seems much more likely he would want to hold them fully responsible. If there had been ANY evidence he could have used to push that narrative, he would have.

The US Army-virus link has absolutely nothing to do with Fort Dix.
“According to the unfounded accusation, which reports say has been widely shared on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to China when 300 US military members arrived in the Wuhan region for the Military World Games in mid-October and infected the local population. None of the servicemembers who made the trip have tested positive for the virus.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/chinese-officials-blame-us-army-for-coronavirus-67267/amp

[womanofthehills]

18. Problem is the Trump administration was still giving money

To EcoHealth. Trump stopped the funding for the Wuhan Lab during the end of April 2020. Just posted about the Fort Detrick story to show how mistakes can easily be made in labs - not to say Chinese story had any merit. I’m surprised people aren’t freaked out about our bio 4 research labs and why aren’t they calling for an end to this research In our Country like Obama did.

[intrepidity]

19. No, I am not certain of that at all

Last edited Fri Apr 16, 2021, 05:39 PM - Edit history (1)

In fact, I am fairly confident that the virus has a natural evolution and that transmission was zoonotic.

But what intrigues me is the cover-up. When someone goes to great lengths to obscure something, there's a reason.

When I received my scientific training, one of the most valuable tips I learned was to design experiments as though you were trying to *disprove* your favored hypothesis. To approach your studies as a contrarian--because your peer reviewers will most certainly be doing so. It's the best way to try to ensure a balanced perspective, to fight against our natural inclination towards confirmation bias.

So that partly explains my approach to this. The other part, as I described above, is my observation of odd behaviors on the part of the CCP regarding this question on origins. That set off major alarms for me.

In terms of the Nature citation issue: nobody will ever convince me that it was trivial. Even for a "rushed" paper. Especially because of the surrounding circumstances: it was Shi's own prior work that deserved the cite. One thing I can absolutely guarantee you: no scientist, especially when writing a paper for Nature, omits an opportunity to cite their own published work. Go ahead and ask any/every scientist you know if that is a fair statement. Not to mention that the piece of data in question (RaTG13 sequence) was the central, pivotal piece of data proving the paper's thesis: that the newly discovered infectious agent was a bat coronavirus. Why not mention that you know this because your lab collected that specimin back in 2013 inside of a mineshaft where, just months prior, six workers contracted a mysterious respiratory disease--that would kill three of them--and that you partially sequenced that specimin and published about it in 2016? I mean, that is the normal way for a scientist to report a finding.

Below is the Addendum, published a full nine months later. See for yourself. There's nothing relevent in there that wasn't known in Feb 2020, and the critical citation I'm so concerned with is right there, too--Ge et al (2016). Why the nine month delay? Aren't you even a little bit curious?

Published: 17 November 2020

Addendum: A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin

Peng Zhou, Xing-Lou Yang, […]Zheng-Li Shi
Nature volume 588, pageE6(2020)

Here we provide further information about the bat SARS-related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV) strain RaTG13 reported in our Article. Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients (one of whom was deceased) who showed severe respiratory disease. These patients had visited a mine cave in Tongguan town, Mojiang County, Yunnan Province, China, to clean bat faeces in order to mine copper before being admitted to the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University on 26–27 April 2012. The samples we received were collected by the hospital staff in June, July, August and September 2012. To investigate the cause of the respiratory disease, we tested the samples using PCR methods developed in our laboratory targeting the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRp) of Ebola virus, Nipah virus and bat SARSr-CoV Rp3, and all of the samples were negative for the presence of these viruses. We also tested the serum samples for the presence of antibodies against the nucleocapsid proteins of these three viruses, and none of the samples gave a positive result. Recently, we retested the samples with our validated enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against the SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) nucleocapsid protein—which has greater than 90% amino acid sequence identity with bat SARSr-CoV Rp3—and confirmed that these patients were not infected by SARS-CoV-2.

We suspected that the patients had been infected by an unknown virus. Therefore, we and other groups sampled animals including bats, rats and musk shrews in or around the cave, and found some alphacoronaviruses1 and paramyxoviruses2. Between 2012 and 2015, our group sampled bats once or twice a year in this cave and collected a total of 1,322 samples. From these samples, we detected 293 highly diverse coronaviruses, of which 284 were designated alphacoronaviruses and 9 were designated betacoronaviruses on the basis of partial RdRp sequences. All of the nine betacoronaviruses are SARSr-CoVs, one of which (sample ID4991; renamed RaTG13 in our Article to reflect the bat species, the location and the sampling year) was described in a 2016 publication1. The partial RdRp sequence (370 bp) of ID4991 was deposited in GenBank in 2016 under accession number KP876546. All of the identified bat SARSr-CoVs are distantly related to SARS-CoV based on partial RdRp sequences. In 2018, as the next-generation sequencing technology and capability in our laboratory had improved, we performed further sequencing of these bat viruses and obtained almost the full-length genome sequence (without the 5? and 3? ends) of RaTG13. In 2020, we compared the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 with our unpublished bat coronavirus sequences and found that it shared a 96.2% identity with RaTG13.

References
1.
Ge, X. Y. et al. Coexistence of multiple coronaviruses in several bat colonies in an abandoned mineshaft. Virol. Sin. 31, 31–40 (2016).

[Phoenix61]

22. Not even a little.

I’m more inclined to think it was an editing error or an artifact of the dreaded Google docs.

[intrepidity]

23. LOL, ok, that's funny

[Phoenix61]

24. I've given this some thought and it seems like

you want to know why things happened the way they did. I had a similar situation of needing information from people who were being very secret squirrely about it so... I came up with a back story. I was a grad student researching how blah-blah was done and I was having a really hard time finding any info and could they please help me. Thirty minute phone call all about how they did things there. The exact information they wouldn’t give me before. So, I would call Nature and tell them about the horrible Phd advisor I have and how they are making a big deal about this and could they PLEASE explain what happened so I can get him off my back. Not saying you should do this. Just sharing what I would do. I’ve gotten very detail oriented about plenty of things. Different strokes, right?

[intrepidity]

25. Hey, good on you for pursuing it

With this situation, it is evident that the Addendum was due to folks just like you, asking the right questions of the appropriate people.

The problem, in this case, is that nine months is an eternity during a pandemic, and that all sorts of information (and misinformation) got a good toe-hold.

And we're left trying to sift through everything to discover the facts. Which is all I'm trying to do and to repeatedly--mostly unsuccessfully--trying to get a conversation here going on it.

[LanternWaste]

29. So you're simply doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results...?

"Which is all I'm trying to do and to repeatedly--mostly unsuccessfully--trying to get a conversation here going on it."

[intrepidity]

30. The time delta keeps me hopeful

As more time passes, more info becomes available.

[womanofthehills]

11. Article from 2020 WaPo- In 2018 our State Dept was worried about coronavirus escaping from the lab

Opinion: State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. Well that's all I need to hear to feel a need to go out and abuse people who look remotely Chinese

[intrepidity]

5. Yep, that's the absurdist take on it

Racists never needed an excuse.

[womanofthehills]

13. Actually - Our government was funding research at the Wujan lab thru Pater Daszak's Eco Health

and Galveston's bio lab trained many of the scientists at the Wujan lab. The lab was in China, but much of the coronavirus research money was coming from Eco Health.

Galveston bio lab explains connections to Wuhan

In a biocontainment laboratory, there’s always a risk of something going wrong, Dr. James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory said.

People can unintentionally be stuck with a needle or bitten by an infected animal, causing a breach of even the most secure lab protocols.

But as a theory about a Chinese lab being the original source of the global coronavirus pandemic circulates at the highest level of the U.S. government, LeDuc was cautious about placing blame on the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I certainly wouldn’t say that there isn’t a possibility for something to get released out of our laboratory or any other lab around the world,” LeDuc said. “I can say there are redundant safety mechanisms in place both here, and certainly in Wuhan, that guard against that.
“But sometimes accidents happen,” he said

https://www.galvnews.com/news/free/article_daafd290-4015-5e83-aeb2-c038036da0d9.html

[Celerity]

12. In March, once the WHO-China mission was complete, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director

general, said that "all hypotheses remain on the table."


China under pressure after WHO chief revives lab leak theory

https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1697906.html




https://www.who.int/news/item/30-03-2021-who-calls-for-further-studies-data-on-origin-of-sars-cov-2-virus-reiterates-that-all-hypotheses-remain-open

[womanofthehills]

14. Interesting that Peter Daszak's Eco Health was funding the coronavirus research at the Wujan lab

and he was the one who led the WHO's first trip to Wujan to try to find info. Following article written by Sam Husseini who is a contributing author at The Nation and is the communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

“Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.”

This statement was written in the New York Times earlier this year by Peter Daszak. Daszak is the longtime president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit whose claimed focus is pandemic prevention. But the EcoHealth Alliance, it turns out, is at the very centre of the COVID-19 pandemic in many ways

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ecohealth-alliance-has-hidden-almost-40-million-in-pentagon-funding/

[stopdiggin]

16. and meanwhile -- I believe I'll stick with the 'other' 99%

of scientific opinion ...

WHO investigation -- It was “extremely unlikely” that the laboratory’s work was behind the outbreak that struck the city at the end of 2019, said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety and animal disease specialist who chaired the investigation team. “It isn’t a hypothesis we suggest implies further study.”

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n428

[womanofthehills]

20. Our CIA director Burns said yesterday that the WHO report is not their assessment

During House Committee meeting yesterday with Rep Fitzpatrick

BURNS: “I think at this point, as Director Haines said, this is something that we’re still analyzing, with the benefit of all of the various sources that the intelligence community can bring to bear.”

FITZPATRICK: “But, with regard to WHO’s assessment, they’ve obviously come out and said it’s very unlikely. Is that consistent with the intelligence community’s assessment?”

BURNS: “I think that is not an assessment that we are prepared to make at this point. We are weighing both of the options that Director Haines described.”

https://gizmodo.com/cia-we-cant-rule-out-the-lab-leak-theory-of-covid-19s-1846690662

[stopdiggin]

26. clearly a political statement

And (unfortunately) there are plenty of that class that see the usefulness of a stick that they can use to beat up an adversary. No need to surrender that stick ahead of time. Same ol'.

I would ordinarily be completely in with statements about 'investigation' and 'analysis' except during times when those innocuous words are seized upon and exploited by the ever widening band of conspiracy loons. Now-a-days we have to have a deep state story to cover every contingency. At this time the answers may not be definitive (and perhaps can never be) but a large portion of the scientific community have coalesced around the position that there is virtually no evidence for lab creation/lab escape narrative. And I see no reason to challenge that position without really convincing evidence to the contrary. Meaning -- inference, innuendo and 'suggestive' aren't going to cut it at this time. I'm sticking with the scientists (the majority of them) on this one.
----- -----
(The argument surrounding whether the scientific community should be harvesting and studying potential pathogens -- from the wild and/or lab grown -- is, to my mind, a separate discussion. And an interesting one with some twists and turns. But, again -- really no suggestion that this is what happened here.)

[Initech]

21. Can we start referring to these idiots as bioterrorists?

Really they're playing games with the virus, and this is something you don't want to play games with.

[womanofthehills]

28. Worse than you can imagine - labs doing dangerous research springing up all over world

Opinion: The world still hasn’t figured out how to regulate research into deadly viruses

One person who has thought a lot about who that sheriff might be is Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London. Lentzos is an expert on biological agents and emerging pathogen threats. And what she has to say isn’t reassuring.

She explains that scientists around the world work with the most dangerous pathogens in Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) labs. “But there are no international regulations [on those labs]. There’s no set international law that they have to follow. There's nobody checking what they're doing. There are no inspectors, no regulators. There's none of that.”

It gets even worse. Lentzos tells me that the system is so uncontrolled that there’s not even a proper list of these facilities. “You cannot track them because there’s not even an official international list of global BSL-4 labs,” she explains.

That’s an urgent priority because the proliferation of BSL-4 labs without corresponding regulation is a ticking time bomb for dangerous pathogens. Even though most of these labs are doing legitimate research rather than developing biological weapons, the benefits to society might not always outweigh the potential for a catastrophic accident

.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/11/biosecurity-covid19-laboratories-wuhan/